Page 119 of Cruel Kiss

"Everything's fine. I was in the neighborhood. I wanted to see the place."

She takes me around, though I've seen it a hundred times. The central air. The laundry room with its six machines humming for forty children. The reading nook, where a boy I don't recognize is folded into a beanbag with a book about sharks. I think of Hayden, and my throat closes up so tight that I have to look away.

I end up at the window over the courtyard. The one that used to be a cracked parking lot before I turned dirty money into a place for children to run.

That same girl from my visit with Cali is back on the swing. Dark braids. Small hands wrapped around the chains. She's pumping her legs, throwing herself back and forth, going higher andhigher, and there's nobody standing over her telling her to slow down or sit still or take up less room. She just goes as high as she can, simplybecauseshe can.

I built this place so no child would ever see what I saw. I built it in my mother's name, to spite my father and everything Igor was. Anna, who got smaller and smaller, year on year, until there was almost nothing left of her to see.

And tonight, I have to go stand in a room and answer for being Igor's son. For a crown I inherited from a man I spent my whole life trying not to become.

There's a symmetry to it I don't much care for.

"You know," Louisa says, coming up beside me, "you've got a real somber air about you today. You look like a man saying goodbye."

I don't turn from the window. "I wouldn't dream of it," I lie.

"Hm." She watches the girl swing. "You'd tell me if something was wrong? If the money was?—"

"The money's fine. There'll always be enough for this place. I've made sure of it."

But I say it too firmly. Her mouth tightens.

"Don't you know we need you?" she says. "This place. Those children. You act like you're just the man who signs the checks, but you've been more than that from the start, whether or not you like it." She puts a hand on my arm, this small woman who thinks I'm a generous lawyer, who has no idea the money that keeps her orphanage running comes off the top of everything I've done wrong. "Whatever it is you're carrying today, you oughtto set it down long enough to remember that. We need you around."

The girl on the swing reaches the top of her arc and hangs there, weightless, for one bright second.

"I'll remember," I tell her.

Then I go, because if I stay any longer, I'll do something I can't take back, and there's still a war to prepare for.

I set the terms through Grigor. That's how it's done—thepakhandoesn't haggle directly with the man trying to snatch his crown. Two old-country men speak through an intermediary in the old-country tongue, working out where and how a life gets weighed.

Neutral ground. That's the first thing. No home turf for either side, nowhere that gives Lev the room's loyalty or gives it to me.

There's only one place I want it, though I don't tell Grigor why.

Warehouse three off the BQE.

It's the place I sat down at Pyotr's level in an ordinary office chair and gave a frightened old man his life instead of condemning him to a shallow grave. The place I chose, once, not to be my father. If I'm going to stand trial for being Igor's son, I'll do it standing in the one room where I proved I wasn't.

"Captains as jury," Grigor relays back to me, in the car. "Under the old law. Both sides present what they have. He agrees to all of it."

"And my wife?"

Grigor hesitates. "That was the sticking point. He didn't want her in the room."

"And?"

"I told him what you told me to say: that she's coming, or there's no sit-down." Grigor's mouth twitches. "He thought about it for a long time. Then he laughed and said, let her come and bring her little computer. He also said…" Grigor glances at me. "… that whatever's on her fancy spreadsheet, he's got something that outweighs it. 'It won't matter what she shows them, once I show them what I've got,' he said."

Of course he did.

Lev consented because he is certain. He's got his bomb—the story that Pyotr gave up under pressure—and he's weighed it against a woman with a laptop and decided the woman doesn't count. He looked at Calista Meadows and saw a tool, a lever, an operator to be acquired, the same as I once did. The same as Todd did. The same as every man in this whole story has done—right up until the moment she took them apart.

He's making the mistake one last time. The biggest one. And he's doing it because he cannot imagine that the most dangerous thing in that warehouse tonight will be the woman he agreed to let in as an afterthought.

His fucking mistake.